Community Corner
Cranberry Cub Scouts, VFW, Give Respectful Sendoff to American Flags
The pack participates in its first flag retirement cermoney.
Fire lit up the dark parking lot behind Monday evening as Cranberry Cub Scout Pack 406 and members of Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 879 participated in a flag retirement ceremony.
Cub Master Joe Maguire said it was the first time the pack, which consists of 50 boys in grades kindergarten through fifth-grade, had participated in a flag retirement.
As part of the ceremony, each boy held a piece of flag that had been cut into red stripes, white stripes and the blue field with the fifty white stars. When their group was called, each Cub deposited his piece of flag into the flames burning out of a half barrel.
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After Maguire read some of the history behind the American flag, the VFW members also deposited retired Stars and Stripes into the flames followed up by a salute.
“Some of the young guys were nervous as they went into it,” Maguire said. “I think it went pretty well for our first time out.”
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It won’t be the last, either.
The Cubs on Monday burned just eight of the estimated 1,000 flags collected in the . Located at the Cranberry Township Municipal Center since May, the receptacle was the c whose husband is an Army veteran.
Flags from the bin are collected every few weeks and eventually destroyed in a respectful retirement.
Etter attended Monday’s ceremony, and Maguire told her the pack would continue to retire the flags in the proper manner. According to flag code, an unserviceable “Old Glory” should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning, and not tossed in the garbage.
“You keep collecting them and we’ll keep retiring them,” he told her.
Etter said she was pleased with the retirement ceremony, which was the first one she has ever attended. She added the local Girl Scouts organization also has asked her for flags so they could perform their own retirement ceremonies.
“It was everything I was hoping that it would be,” she said of Monday’s event.
In the future, Maguire said he would like to involve the township in large-scale flag retirement ceremony.
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